Saturday, March 22, 2014

The 2013 Global (Climate) Insanity Awards

In returning from a posting hiatus, I thought I’d clean up a
few odds and ends before beginning this year’s posts. This one concerns countries the net effect of
whose policies and business and personal efforts has given the strongest
impetus to oncoming climate disaster (as laid out in previous posts, and
specifically referring to the “worst consequences” outcome described in Hansen’s
recent paper and summarized here). It
goes without saying that in order to act as they have, these countries are
deserving of the psychological label “insane” if anyone is.

Let’s start right in.

#1: Canada

I have attempted in several posts to lay out the reasoning
behind James Hansen’s scientific assessment that use of tar sands and oil shale
will mean “game over for the environment”, in the sense that together with even
minimal use of oil, coal, and natural gas from now on, they will lead to “worst
consequences.” For several years, Canada
under its latest prime minister has been going full steam ahead in attempting
to mine the Athabasca tar sands, which contain a major fraction of the world’s
known tar sands. In order to
successfully sell this “product”, a major modification of infrastructure must
be accomplished, and Canada is now – according to credible reports -- going all
out to create this infrastructure, including muzzling its own scientists,
distorting the facts about the actual carbon emissions, and allying with the
Koch brothers (US businessmen deeply invested in all forms of carbon-polluting
energy) to lobby foreign governments to allow Canada to create the
infrastructure to export the resulting “dirty” oil.

If Canada were not pushing tar sands oil in 2013, including
but not limited to the “gateway drug” Keystone XL export pipeline, it is very
unlikely that there would be even a possibility of this “worst of all outcomes”. I need only mention that the prime minister
is also under the delusion that sea ice in the central Arctic won’t melt for a
good long time, so that Canada can make profits from its Northwest Passage, and
the picture of insanity is complete. But that’s really a side show; the
introduction of tar sands oil and attempts to make it viable earn Canada 2013’s
Number 1 spot.

#2: The United States

It was a tough choice here between the US and China. The US won because its policies, politics,
and business interests combined in 2013 (and previous years) to slow world
attempts to cut back on carbon pollution in ways that made it more and more
difficult for the world to respond. The failure
over the last few years to squelch the Keystone XL pipeline is merely the icing
on the cake.

The failure primarily of Republican office-holders to
recognize that politics ends at climate disaster’s edge – and, in particular, failure
to understand that accepting oil lobby money for votes should be a matter of
how to engineer a soft landing for these companies during changeover to
solar/wind, not how to double down on carbon pollution and its infrastructure
using the chimera of “energy independence” – combined with the willful “stick
my head in the sand” voting of almost half the population, as well as the
delusion of most businesses that their “green” efforts are anywhere near what’s
needed and business’ failure to recognize that outsourcing is effectively
increasing carbon pollution – produce a worldwide result in which overall
carbon emissions increases become ever more entrenched in the system. As Hansen notes, the facts speak for
themselves: whatever minor decreases
appear to be occurring in US carbon pollution, the worldwide level continues to
rise at the same rate – which would not happen if the country that produces
more carbon pollution than any other were exercising any countervailing force.

#3: China

As it turns out, despite the solar fluff sold to foreigners,
China is rapidly ramping up its coal emissions, and has committed to coal
gasification plants that have repeatedly proved that they cannot effectively
capture and sequester a significant part of the resulting emissions. What makes China better than the US, given
that its carbon pollution is increasing faster in percentage and absolute
terms? Only that the ability of America
to retard the rest of the world’s reaction to the problem, and its contribution
to carbon pollution, is still greater than China’s.

#4: Australia

Despite the efforts of the former prime minister to
administer even a modest check on internal pollution, Australia under its next
prime minister is now going back to “business as usual” while massively mining
coal to sell to foreign countries. Since
Australia is one of the first countries in which the weather consequences –
from unprecedented catastrophic rains to catastrophic droughts – is becoming
blatantly obvious, it takes a special kind of insane blindness to do this. However, even the massive amounts of
Australian fossil-fuel reserves don’t have the same effect as US and Chinese
actions; so #4 it is.

#5: India

India has been ramping up carbon emissions – from a smaller
base – almost as fast as China, and I understand it has been tapping coal as
well. I also understand that they’re
using the same excuse as China: hey, we
need it to develop. I’m sure that will
be a great consolation as they deal with the flooding of Bangladesh and
increases in heat and storm violence that render the “agricultural miracle” of
the 1960s null and void.

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Wayne Kernochan

About Me

I have recently retired. Before retirement, I was a long-time computer industry analyst at firms like Aberdeen Group and Yankee Group, and before that a programmer at Prime Computer and Computer Corp. of America. Sloan/MIT MBA, Cornell Computer Science Master's, and Harvard college degrees. Used to play the violin, and have written unpublished books about personal finance, violin playing, and the relationship between religion and mathematics, as well as three plays, two musicals, a screenplay on climate change, short stories, and poetry. I intend to use this blog in future both to continue to enjoy the computing field and to pursue my interests in many other areas (e.g., climate change, history, issues of the day).